Three years into our Climate Stewardship 2030 programme, we are seeing corporate climate strategies being tested for their ability to attract capital, withstand disruption and deliver through changing economic and political conditions.
Read this article to understand:
- Four forces reshaping corporate transition strategies
- How companies are responding by scaling, adapting or retrenching
- How this is shaping our corporate, sovereign and wider policy engagement priorities
For much of the past decade, corporate climate strategies were mainly judged by their stated ambitions: their targets, the coverage of their emissions and their alignment with particular temperature pathways.
Those remain important foundations. But our experience through the award-winning Climate Stewardship 2030 programme (CS30) suggests that the more revealing test now lies in delivery: not simply whether a company has a credible transition ambition, but whether that ambition can withstand commercial and operational reality.1
In our previous article on holistic climate stewardship, we argued that investors needed to look beyond targets and consider the wider systems in which companies operate (see “Moving beyond decarbonisation: from climate targets to transition credibility”).2
Our experience since has sharpened the question: Can management translate ambition into a viable operational and financial plan that remains credible as financing costs, demand, technology, infrastructure and policy change?
CS30 at a glance
Launched in 2024, Climate Stewardship 2030 (CS30) is our flagship climate stewardship programme, combining direct company engagement, value-chain mobilisation and policy advocacy. It focuses on companies and sectors that play a material role in the global transition.
Through to 2030, we aim to maintain regular and ongoing engagement with companies representing a significant proportion of our financed emissions in material sectors.3 In 2025, we held 200 engagements with 101 companies, as reported in our latest annual sustainability review.4
Four forces are reshaping corporate transition strategies
Our CS30 engagement since 2024 points to four forces reshaping corporate transition strategies: capital discipline; technology infrastructure; energy demand and security; and policy costs and incentives. Together, they are influencing whether companies proceed with, redesign or defer the projects, investments and delivery pathways underpinning their transition strategies (see Figure 1).5
Figure 1: The four forces shaping corporate transition strategies
Source: Aviva Investors, 30 September 2026.
Our company engagements found examples representing all four of these factors.
1. Capital discipline is raising the bar for transition investment
Higher financing costs, uncertain future revenues and competition for capital are raising the investment threshold for both new and existing transition projects. Even where a project supports a company’s long-term climate objectives, it may be re-designed, deferred or discontinued if expected returns, customer demand or policy support remain unclear.
For example, following strategic reviews a US industrial-gas producer exited several projects, expecting a pre-tax charge of several billion dollars, while a European energy company decided not to restart construction of a biofuels facility it judged insufficiently competitive.
These decisions illustrate a broader shift: transition investment increasingly needs to compete on commercial as well as strategic grounds.
2. Technology and infrastructure constraints are forcing more selective transition plans
Many corporate strategies assume that technologies and their supporting infrastructure will be available at the required time and scale. In practice, these technologies are developing at different speeds.
For instance, hydrogen and carbon-capture projects can depend on access to sufficient clean power, production capacity, pipelines, storage sites and customer demand; a delay in any one of those can hold up an entire project.
Companies are therefore phasing their investments more selectively. A European steelmaker is prioritising electric-arc furnaces until green hydrogen becomes more available and affordable. It expects hydrogen and carbon capture to make a larger contribution to its strategy after 2030. Similarly, a large Australian miner reported that current battery-electric haul trucks would make it lose around 1,000 productive hours per vehicle each year. As a result, it lengthened its anticipated timeline for full fleet electrification.
Technological advances or policy support may improve these options, but future potential is not a substitute for a credible near-term implementation plan.
3. Rising electricity demand is creating investment opportunities – and testing energy security
The International Energy Agency projects that global data-centre electricity consumption will roughly double from 485 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 to 950 TWh by 2030, with consumption from AI-focused data centres tripling.6 This growth may create opportunities for generators, networks and low-carbon power providers. But it may also strain grids, and complicate emissions pathways if higher-carbon generation is used to meet the additional demand.
A North American regulated utility in our programme has acknowledged that unprecedented load growth, driven partly by data centres, will affect its pathway to reduce Scope 1 emissions by 80 per cent by 2030, while requiring substantial capital investment to meet demand and maintain its system reliability.
The tension is clear: demand growth can support new infrastructure, but it does not automatically reduce emissions. Whether it does will depend on what is built, how it is powered and which existing generation it displaces.
4. Competitiveness is reshaping climate-policy delivery
Governments are increasingly pursuing decarbonisation alongside broader objectives such as energy security, industrial resilience, technological leadership and economic competitiveness. As a result, corporate transition investment is affected not only by climate policy, but by how governments balance these competing priorities through carbon pricing, subsidies, permitting, trade measures and electricity-market design.
At a South Korean electronics group, management has estimated that moving its energy-intensive semiconductor operations immediately to 100 per cent renewable electricity through domestic power-purchase agreements could increase its total electricity costs by around ten per cent. This illustrates how local power-market conditions can affect both the pace and commercial viability of decarbonisation.
A tougher environment is producing greater divergence
Companies are responding to these pressures in three broad ways: scaling investment where the commercial case is strengthening; adapting the route to delivery while retaining the underlying objective; or retrenching by reducing investment or ambition without an equivalent alternative.
Scaling
Some companies are expanding their transition activities where they see a commercial opportunity. They are commissioning assets, developing revenue streams or directing additional capital towards areas of growing demand.
A North American waste-management business, for example, completed two renewable-natural-gas facilities and two recycling projects during the third quarter of 2025. These investments illustrate how transition-related assets can become a viable and growing part of a business.
Adapting
Other companies retain their underlying objectives but are changing the order, design or technology through which they expect to deliver them. This may involve phasing investment, acquiring rather than developing an asset, changing the balance between technologies or waiting for clearer demand before committing further capital.
For example, a European fertiliser producer moved away from a planned greenfield low-carbon ammonia project. Instead, it prioritised the acquisition of an existing US Gulf Coast ammonia facility which was not low carbon. The decision reduced construction and execution risk and offered a faster route to cash generation, but it also changed the company’s original transition pathway by delaying investment in new low-carbon production capacity.
Retrenching
A third group is reducing elements of its ambition, withdrawing planned investment or placing greater emphasis on conventional businesses without setting out an equally credible alternative pathway.
For example, a European integrated energy company has reset its strategy to place greater emphasis on higher-return oil and gas while adopting a more capital-light approach to transition businesses. The change followed concerns about financial performance, capital discipline and the expected returns from parts of its previous strategy.
What this means for corporate stewardship
A company should not pursue climate projects regardless of economics. But where its ambition or investment changes materially, a firm’s credibility depends on whether its management can explain why the implications for previously stated objectives and capital allocation have changed, and how it is governing the revised strategy.
Our refreshed CS30 priorities for 2026-2027 therefore place greater emphasis on the evidence underpinning the delivery of corporate transition plans.
Implementation must be investable
An investable transition strategy connects a company’s climate objectives to its operating plans and capital allocation. Its credibility depends not just on the amount of capital committed, but on the firm’s clarity about its main delivery levers, their expected contribution, the investment required and the commercial, policy and technological assumptions underpinning them.
For investors, the criteria and time horizons used to compare competing technology or delivery options also reveal how management is balancing near-term returns with long-term delivery.
Delivery also depends on physical climate resilience
Commercially viable transition plans must be resilient to the physical climate conditions in which companies operate. Material hazards can affect their asset location and design, operating continuity, supply chains and capital requirements. What we look for is whether these risks – and appropriate adaptation measures – inform each firm’s investment and operational decisions.
Scenario analysis is valuable where it changes those decisions and clarifies the residual risks.
Accountability must follow
As strategies change, management needs to remain accountable for the decisions that determine delivery: which projects proceed, which are deferred, how capital is reallocated and what happens to interim milestones. Boards need to understand why assumptions have changed, the implications on the company’s long-term objectives and how management is governing the resulting trade-offs.
Where delivery depends on public policy, corporate advocacy should also become part of the strategy. Calls for policy change should address genuine barriers without undermining the company’s stated objectives.
For example, a European chemicals producer has sought changes to the EU Emissions Trading System in response to high energy and carbon costs. Our engagement has focused on whether the company’s advocacy supports policy frameworks that can both enable long-term decarbonisation and maintain the conditions needed for continued industrial investment.
Corporate evidence is shaping our sovereign engagement and policy advocacy
CS30 combines company engagement, value-chain mobilisation and policy advocacy. Across these strands, recurring barriers – including grid connections, infrastructure, planning and permitting, policy durability and viable markets – often sit beyond the control of any individual business. Evidence from our corporate and value-chain work therefore informs our sovereign and broader policy priorities.
A stronger focus on sovereign delivery
Building on the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) letters sent to more than 50 sovereign issuers in 2024, our refreshed priorities place greater emphasis on how national commitments will be delivered.7 We are looking for credible implementation and investment frameworks, stronger adaptation and resilience planning, and clear accountability for delivery.
Policy advocacy for enabling conditions
The same emphasis informs our wider policy advocacy work, including the UK low-carbon investment policy roadmap and our advocacy at nature COP17 and climate COP31.8 In these international discussions, we are calling for an integrated approach to climate mitigation, adaptation and nature, with national delivery plans and policy frameworks that mobilise public and private finance, supported by stronger coordination and accountability (see Global climate and nature conferences: Why investors should care).
From ambition to evidence
These priorities will form the basis of the updated expectations we communicate to companies in the CS30 programme by the end of 2026, increasingly focusing on three questions:
- Is implementation investable?
- Is the pathway resilient?
- And is accountability keeping pace?
Answering them requires detailed company-level analysis, alongside an understanding of the wider policy, infrastructure and market conditions shaping what companies can deliver.
The most credible strategies will not necessarily be those that remain unchanged, but those capable of absorbing new information, allocating capital with discipline and retaining a viable route to long-term delivery. These are the qualities investors need to assess when determining which climate strategies can remain credible through changing market, policy and technological conditions.
